Old /boot, Grub, FC3

[Nick Geovanis <n-geovanis@northwestern.edu>]

> Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:55:57 -0600
> From: "Mikkel L. Ellertson" <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com>
> Subject: Re: Old /boot, Grub, FC3
> Message-ID: <43D526BD.40502 at infinity-ltd.com>
> 
> Nick Geovanis <n-geovanis at northwestern.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Have an HP Pavilion 6630 (old, 500MHz), it has a two-channel IDE
> > controller. FC3 is already installed on channel A, which it calls ide0,
> > with a WD drive as master and an older Samsung CD drive as slave. IDE
> > channel B is empty. I want some extra disk space, so I put a former FC3
> > boot/root/installation drive on channel B to build new filesystems;
> > nothing on it I want to save. Rebooting the machine, Grub chokes when it
> > finds the old partition labelled /boot on the newly-installed drive cabled
> > to channel B. The logs show that FC3 booted and configured both IDE
> > channels as ide0 and ide1, and found all three drives, but then it got
> > confused and tried to mount non-existent partitions, ended-up losing /usr,
> > 
> A couple of points here. First of all, it is not Grub that is having
> the problem. All Grub does is load the kernel, and the initial RAM
> disk. After that, the kernel takes over, and mounts the root file
> .... 

But it may be that the "wrong" kernel was booted, namely the one on the
older but newly installed drive on ide1/channel B. It had once been a
full boot/root/user-flesystems drive for FC3. Understand that the BIOS
setup screens on this motherboard do not permit one to distinguish between
multiple, internal IDE disk-drives. You can choose USB boot, CDROM boot,
removable media boot, "internal hard-drive" boot; but you can't make a
choice from among the latter.

> Now, you can not directly tell the system to ignore the file systems
> on the new drive without disabling the drive all together.

Disagree. I made no new entries in /etc/fstab to mount the second,
newly-installed drive's partitions. Therefore they should have been
ignored. So it seems that there are only two possibilites: (1) The 
correct drive was booted (channel A/ide0 master) but the wrong
partitions were found at mount time; or (2) The incorrect drive was 
booted (channel B/ide1 master) and, again, the wrong partitions were
selected for mounting.

Or is it possible that Grub (or the BIOS?) only want one IDE master over
the whole dual-channel IDE controller? My understanding was that each
channel needed its own master, and I've never had a problem before with
DOS, Windo$e or linux in that situation.

> Mikkel

* Nick Geovanis
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